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Mike Rowe: U.S. facing ‘epidemic of fatherlessness’

Mike Rowe: U.S. facing ‘epidemic of fatherlessness’

TV host Mike Rowe said Tuesday that guns and video games are merely a symptom to America’s bullying problem and that fatherless homes and lazy parenting are the real contributors to violence.

Mr. Rowe, who is known for his work on the Discovery Channel “Dirty Jobs” and CNN “Somebody’s Gotta Do It,” wrote in a Facebook post that bullying is a “symptom of a society that seems to value fatherhood less and less.”

He shared a list of statistics showing that suicide, homelessness, behavioral disorders and violent tendencies occur more regularly in children who come from fatherless homes.

“Is it really so surprising to learn that a majority of bullies also come from fatherless homes?” he asked. “As do a majority of school shooters? As do a majority of older male shooters?”

Mr. Rowe continued, “I know this is controversial, and I’m sorry to inject an uncomfortable element into a post about a ‘feel-good’ show, but I think it’s important to consider the possibility that this thing we like to call ‘an epidemic of bullying,’ is really an ‘epidemic of fatherlessness.’ I also think it’s reasonable to conclude that our society is sending a message to men of all ages that is decidedly mixed. Think about it. On the one hand, we’re telling them to ‘man-up’ whenever the going gets tough. On the other, we’re condemning a climate of ‘toxic masculinity’ at every turn. If that strikes you as confusing, imagine being a fourteen-year old boy with no father figure to help you make sense of it.”

Mr. Rowe said society is falsely blaming issues such as guns and violent video games instead of recognizing the deeper cultural problem.

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“[T]he bullying crisis is real, but the root cause has nothing to do with video games, or guns, or social media, or rock and roll, or sugary drinks, or any of the other boogymen currently in fashion,” he wrote. “Nor is it a function of some new chromosome unique to the current crop of kids coming of age. Kids are the same now as they were a hundred years ago — petulant, brave, arrogant, earnest, frightened, and cocksure. It’s the parents who have changed. It’s the parents who have put their own happiness above the best interests of their kids. It’s the parents who actually believe ‘the village’ will raise their kids, when the village is profoundly incapable of doing anything of the sort.”

Mr. Rowe’s comments come on the heels of Warren Farrell’s newly released book, “The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It,” which shows that boys without fathers fare worse than boys with fathers on more than 70 different metrics.

“They’re much more likely to drink, much more likely to do drugs, much more likely to be depressed, much more likely to be suicidal, much more likely to be violent, much more likely to be in prison,” Mr. Farrell said. “And they’re also much more likely to commit mass shootings.”

The book was published one month after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 students and teachers were killed.

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Mike Rowe hit the nail on the head. At least their are a few celebrities who have common sense. Black Lives Matter will never address the fatherless issue! God Bless you, Mike Rowe for telling it like it is!

“CNN’s Don Lemon says more than 72 percent of African-American births are out of wedlock”
By Louis Jacobson on Monday, July 29th, 2013 at 6:48 p.m.

We have a government that will support each and every child that is born and the mother declares that she does not know who the father is. We also have a class of women who start having multiple fatherless children at the age of 14 and start collecting welfare.Notice that I said “class” not “race”, because “Jezebel’s” come in all races.

The parenting issue is of great importance but we also have the people that do not value life like those of us that spent years in the service. That is even part of the Senate and House problem. There are not many in office that have served. So as each generation gets more into the world instead of into the taking care of the family and making family right behind our Lord, in my 80+ years it has really changed. And all that you have said Scruffy, is right on and my wife and I spent 13 years where we both volunteered at the pregnancy center where we had about 450 test each month and had 8 different programs to help people understand about life. To all, have a Blessed Easter. pilot77 USMC.

In 2016, the DEMOCRATS celebrated 50 years of abortion, since Roe vs. Wade. Democrats celebrated the Margaret Sanger sanction, promoted her legacy and her book, most of which was adopted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, during World War II! The celebration was about the murder of 42 million babies, and their future dependency upon society. Statistics show that more than 90% were blacks, and/or non-whites. Many call it what Sanger promoted, openly, in all of her works, GENOCIDE!!!

Absolutely. What do you think Planned Parenthood is REALLY all about: control of the non-white races. All of the Democrats like to tout what a wonderful, caring, and magnanamous outfit they are, but in reality, it is nothing more than sanctioned genocide.

Can you imagine how much larger the welfare rolls would be if they didn’t get all those abortions? While I don’t support abortions if they didn’t get the amount they have we would have been bankrupt several years ago just trying to pay for all the added welfare. The reason they need so many abortions is they are even too lazy to take birth control pills which are provided free to them.

It is all about a civilizations state sanctioned worldview. What has State sanctioned so-called unbiased Secular Humanism legalized since it’s imposition in 1962? No-fault divorce, abortion on demand, promiscuous sex normalization as sex education, normalizing of pornography, sodomy, transgender, etc, by Democrat Party and Rino legislation.

After The Second World War our Chief Counsel Robert H. Jackson indicted Nazi leaders for disrespecting the victims of the holocausts God given right to life, our creed at the time, even though the Nazi Government, and Supreme Court passed laws sanctioning the holocaust. Today Robert H. Jackson would be called a criminal for believing in the God the majority trusted in Government, Law, Education. People do whatever is the State Law, as it is legislated the new normal.” What is legal is moral”, has been used to justify all kinds of atrocities through history, and today Democrat Party- Rino legislation is destroying families.

Yes thank you democrats and especially Johnson’s great society for all this huge cost and the fatherless children but also put a lot of the blame on the women who chose to have kids without a father. They had a choice and chose to have the government to replace the father.

Yes, the fatherless homes are a big part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the left doing everything in their power to emasculate every male in the country, and turn them into blobs of cowering estrogen, unable to defend themselves or their families. It’s disgusting to say the least.

That is one of the main ways you bring down a society. Every other society in the past that has been “feminized” is now lying in the dust … NO exceptions. Even Rome went that way. If you don’t have a strong male population, willing to take care of their families and defend their country if necessary, you are doomed. Breaking up the family unit is where you begin because it is the smallest unit of “government” in the country. It is the foundation. You destroy the foundation, there is nothing left to build on. Just like a mighty tree. It can stand just fine, but if you start hacking away at its roots, it will fall and die.

Men have got to stand up again or this country is history. We are watching the United States be destroyed right in front of our eyes!

I was a divorced mother with 3 children, two girls and a boy who was the youngest. He never recovered losing his father. He was the one who was bullied. Sugar was involved. He was diagnosed with melancholia as a teen. Depression is caused by inflammation caused by sugar. Schizophrenia and depression have the same root cause. Why will no one admit that prescribed psyche meds cause the shootings. http://www.drugawareness.org and http://www.ssristories.net and http://www.madinamerica.com. Every shooter has been on orescribed psyche meds. My son also was diagnosed with acute intermittent porphyria, a rare enzyme disease. The hypoglycemia he had as a teen and AIP manifest in psyche symptoms. Psychiatry treats only symptoms not causes. He has been forced to take psyche meds by mental health courts and psychiatry for 30 years. I’ve been close to this issue that long. Psyche meds are the killers by homocide and suicide. Big Pharma doesn’t care. It’s too big of a money maker. It has bought off the FDA that doesn’t publish the truth about psyche drug research. When a doctor prescribed a psyche med for a 6-month-old baby with colic, that’s a good clue.

Guys, as a gender we are failing in this society. Yes, a lot of society has been rigged against certain groups, men absolutely suffering as a result. It is incumbent upon us however to rise above these things and to be the best that we can be. Anybody can fail and blame it on the system. What made this country and people great was our drive to rise above adversity and achieve. We need to embrace this spirit again, and to become the people that we can be. Become like those in history that we have always admired. Our society and descendants are counting on it.

[How equal is everyone before the law when we have classes of individuals with special rights?]

AND when the laws are definitely dis-proportionally enforced.. A man even raises his hand to a woman, he’s done for DV. A woman on the other hand can KICK HER man in the nuts, and nothing (YES I’ve seen it many a time)..
I can’t find a SINGLE Gym anymore, that’s male only, but i see PLENTY that are women only.. Things like that.

If you have ever been to court against a women only then will you understand where a man sits. It started years ago and all the woman had to do was get a tear in her eye and you were done.She could make any claim she wanted and was accepted as total truth as no proof was ever needed.

Heck, i remember a 60 minutes tv expose down in Texas, where they interviewed a # of FEMALE divorce attorneys, ALL OF which admited they ENCOURAGE their women clients to FALSIFY Sexual assault/child battery claims against their soon-to-be husbands, JUST TO GET MASSIVE amounts of sympathy from any jurors/judges. KNOWING THAT NOT ONE OF THEM WOULD ever be prosecuted for making up said charges, cause they KNOW all the DA’s are so spineless that they don’t GO AFTER fakers who make up charges…

Mike Rowe is right on> I grew up in the 1960’s, there were plenty of guns then. One difference> There was great respect for human life & God hadn’t yet been stripped from everything American. No matter what religion you are, young people need some religious structure to sort of add some purpose to their life. I am convinced that the loosening of morals today causes many problems. Bill Koch Forest Hill,Maryland

“Snattlerake: Some religions teach their adherents that the name of deity is scared and should not be used in common-speech or writing;”

You are right and I thought it ridiculous. It is just a word

Then began to see it is in the empty space that we see G-d

This was not said, but only what I have come to see. It is like the holy of holies when Titus came into the temple and desecrated it. He could not understand the religion because there was nothing to see. It is in the nothing we see everything

If you write G-d you will feel stupid for doing it, then you will see it is the nothing that is everything

And I still feel stupid for doing it but maybe it is in the feeling stupid we learn

Yes, single parent homes cause a lot of damage. But so do music videos, violent movies, books and games as well as this idea that is pushed on our kids that we ‘evolved’ from lower life forms rather than were created by God and will have to one day give account to him.

Agreed; however, the damage of explicit lyrics, lewd videos, fantasy-violence, graphic books, and denigration of morality and religion, can be greatly mitigated with a countervailing influence of morally grounded parents.

The wife and I had most of the normal trials associated with raising four children (2 boys & 2 girls). The children have all turned out fairly well adjusted, and each has a solid moral-foundation. It was totally a team-effort. We had to relearn the art of parenting four times.

I can fully appreciate the difficulty of a single parent attempting to battle the morally-bankrupt influences, where the media is blasting the message that nothing is really wrong…if you don’t get caught; and, there is no consequence for a life of amorality.

In a single-parent household; you’re playing the game with half the team not on the field. I agree with Mike, this puts kids reared is such an environment at a significant disadvantage…in almost every conceivable respect.

It seems that Mike is absolutely spot on correct. Children need a father and a mother. Each brings that special quality to parenting that instill love and values in a child, particularly fatherless boys. In my opinion scoools need to go back to the basics as well. Instead of teaching feel good and false values, opinions, and propaganda, a return to intellectual honesty and an openess to all opinions and values needs to be restored instead of this PC Liberal BS that only confuses children. In the real world participation trophies and anti-competitive, touchy feely pseudo-science hummanities does not work.

“Women have ruined our young man population with the help of our judicial system”

Was going to ask the inevitable question, if fathers are so essential to a child’s well being how do we get them back?

That is when one sees why they are gone.

It has been one concession after another by politicians to the liberal left in the form of money and Supreme Court rulings

Just as many girls as boys grow up in fatherless households but girls make up 56% of college enrollment, so there is also a concerted effort to punish boys for being boys, actually anything male

Which means you can do no right because you are guilty just because of your sex

And it is amazing how those who scream the loudest about discrimination are the one’s do it the most because when one claims they have been oppressed for centuries the only course of action is to discriminate in favor of them which also means discriminating against everyone else who is not a member of this special class

Since it is the Leftist LOONS who have systematically attacked and destroyed the traditional family structure, of course they will NEVER acknowledge the part that it plays in the ills of our SICK society! But then since their objective is the DESTRUCTION of morals, common sense, and, in the end, THIS COUNTRY as a free Republic, I’m sure they are quite happy with the damage they’ve done.

Mike, kudos to you for being brave enough to speak out on this! Unfortunately, fatherlessness is also just a symptom of an even greater travesty. If you look at the statistics; fatherlessness, teenage pregnancy, violent crimes, etc. They all began skyrocketing since 1963 when a wayward supreme court began judicial activism and and ignored 400 years of precedence and exiled God from our public schools (yes, that predates even our formation as an independent nation from Great Britian). And as our forefathers warned and predicted, we are spiraling downward as a society. Until we restore God in our schools and public places, we cannot hope to remain a nation favored by him.